Wednesday, September 1, 2010

So, a few weeks back I picked up Call of Duty: Modern warfare 2. Mouthful of a name, so we just called it Modern Warfare. Played the campaign, beat it in a few hours. Played the online, got to the maximum level in a few days. All in all, it was a decent game--but so much was broken, it was actually sad. The best thing I liked was the Storyline in campaign mode. Rich, interesting, it kept me going and I was sad to see it go so fast.

I guess video game companies got tired of same old "U.S is the good guy, we gonna' go kill us some nameless terrorists in eye-raq". There was no controversy in it all, every game was the same. So, CoD (That's short for Call of Duty if you're a bit dense) decided to say "Fuck that. You want controversy? BAM!"

In a nutshell, the U.S is framed for a mass genocide in Moscow, so the Russian Federation declares war. Pretty dramatic, also head-turning because the U.S, as a country, is portrayed as evil. Le gasp! You get to play as a variety of characters, viewing the war from a different point--but only on the U.S side.

War ensues, people die--in the end, there's so many god damn plot twists, you'd say the game was designed by M. Night Shamalyan. But it wasn't, because it was actually good.

A few days ago, I picked up Bad Company 2. This game was also a pretty controversial, but the storyline was strikingly similar--including the level build. In CoD, there's a mission where you need to recover a downed satelite. In BC2, there's also a mission like that. Where you have to recover it from a snowy outposts. Surrounded by russians.

Hell, BC2 even cracks a joke at it! When a general tells the team that they need to send in a highly specialized team, one of the members exclaims "Why? So they can send in a bunch of douchebags with pussy ass heartbeat monitors?" That's when I knew they meant srs bsns.

All in all, the overall moral of the story is this: Story matters the most. That's what a good game is all about--this is why Just Cause didn't pick up. It's all mindless killing, with a horrible, I mean, HORRIBLE campaign mode. Shit wasn't even creative. Now look at the Warcraft series. It started out as an RTS in a dawn of RTS games--where there were games with better mechanics when it first came out, their lore, pillaged from Warhammer's no less, paved the way for an unstoppable legacy involving multiple games, books and even a movie which is set to come out. Sure, they've butchered the story a good sixty or so times, but a big corp is bound to make mistakes.

All in all, gameplaywise, I'd say I like both games. Call of Duty has that old "Counter-strike" feel, where you kill people in a fixed enviorment. Bad company, on the other hand, treads on realism. Sniping is hard, driving--shooting, hell, this is probably the reason why so many CoD vets suck major nutsack at Bc2. That, and teamwork is a big plus. Destructible buildings combined with a live battlefield--everything one needs to survive. The only negative to the game is, if somebody dicks around, everybody has to pay for it. One idiot drives the copper into the ground, this costs you the lives of the five people killed. Five tickets, if you're the attacker--now you're two tickets in and almost won the game but...you were out. See? That's what I'm talking about.

If people decide to go out and be on their own--because they're such l333t snipers, they'll get mowed down and half the team exterminated. Work together, retards!